Unpaused the Podcast

Polly Leonard is the founder of Selvedge, the world’s leading magazine about the culture of cloth. It’s a one-word cipher about textiles with a cultural edge, who makes them, and how. Polly talks to Judy about why she believes cloth is central to civilisation; she says “fibre may look like fluff, but it carries the weight of human history”. She shares the steps on her creative journey - starting w...

Judy enters the monastic world of ÁBBATTE, where traditional Spanish artisanal techniques are used to create exquisite handwoven textiles.  Project founder Elena Goded Rimbaud talks about transforming the ruins of a 13th century monastery in Segovia into the ÁBBATTE workshop and reviving the region’s handmade textile traditions there. Then, speaking from ÁBBATTE’s Madrid store, Elena describes the...

Photographer and magazine founder, Ruth Ribeaucourt, talks to Judy about her creative collaboration with cult French interiors and homewares brand, Antoinette Poisson .   After photographing ‘A Year in the French Style’ for the brand’s founders, Vincent Farelly and Jean-Baptiste Martin, Ruth was invited to collaborate with them a second time on a range of wallpapers and fabrics, based on their sha...

Judy steps inside the wondrous Madrid atelier of Ana Lamata, maker of exquisite bespoke hats and a world many may have thought was a distant memory.  Surrounded by hat boxes, hand dyed ribbons, linings and trims and her collection of traditional millinery tools, Ana tells Judy how her love of wearing and collecting hats first inspired her to leave behind a promising career as an art historian to b...

Welcome back! In this new series, Unpaused is changing direction. No longer about corporate women reinventing  corporate  careers, the  new  Unpaused will be about women who broke with their careers and found a new calling by making something important  with their hands.  Judy has tried to bring the visual into the realm of the podcast to better convey these transformations in both colour and text...

Coming very soon: a brand new season of Unpaused with Judy Stewart. Unpaused is changing direction. No longer about corporate women reinventing  corporate  careers, the  new  Unpaused will be about women who broke with their careers and found a new calling by making something important  with their hands.  In new episodes, Judy will look at the creative lives of makers, artists and designers from a...

Earlier this year, Judy chanced upon meeting Carolina Guthmann, who, with her husband (former Italian television journalist Piero di Pasquale), are the creative forces behind Manima World in Palermo; a digital atelier of fine, hand embroidered home linens and ready to wear. If there are two words that make my heart beat faster, they are hand embroidered . When Carolina told me it was her mission t...

Margot McKinney is a fourth generation jeweller who has built a global fine jewellery empire. Having hit rock bottom in her early forties, Margot made a fine comeback by backing her own belief that if she liked a piece of jewellery, even if it was shamelessly bold, others would surely follow. And follow they did.  She's now the second biggest supplier of jewellery to Neiman Marcus, the biggest...

At the end of 2006, a French patisserie bakery and cafe called Choquette opened in Brisbane. And with it a small slice of French epicurean life began to take root. Proprietor Lara Keating's dream to create an authentic French cafe experience drew deeply on the influence of her French mother, Francoise. The coffee was great and the pain-au-raisin glorious. Before long, she was partnering with t...

Catherine Walker is the most modest of success stories; retired but by no means idle. I find her happily sequestered in an early Tasmanian farmhouse in picturesque Longford. But it wasn't that long ago that she was being pulled into lead Australia's humanitarian efforts in the Solomon Islands, in Afghanistan and witnessing heartbreaking famine firsthand in North Korea as Australia's mi...

Carol Westmore is a very capable woman. A mathematician by training, she exudes order and authority. However, Carol has found herself immersed in an adventure very much of her own making; the restoration of the artist John Glover's house and farm near Deddington (40kms from Launceston) in Tasmania, Australia. In embracing that undertaking; enormous, costly and full of the usual joys and setbac...

For 8 years, Danielle Alvarez presided at Fred's on Oxford Street, Sydney, over a stylish open kitchen and hearth, roasting pedigreed lamb legs and chickens, in full view of the fortunate few to have secured a booking. And, if Oxford Street was a long way from the Cuban immigrant community in which Danielle grew up in Miami, Florida, the imprint of that exotic childhood, and her grounding in the p...

She writes to paint… or perhaps she paints to write. Either way, Naomi Bulger is a woman who has both sides of her brain hot-wired. And to think it all began with making rural commodities sound sexy. Listen now on Unpaused.  Show Notes: Naomi's illustrations and hand written letters Tangle and Fern (Naomi's branding services) Pep Talks Podcast Naomi's Instagram Further Reading: Steal Like an...

Eleanor Roosevelt conducted a parallel life beyond the view of most of the American people, despite occupying the most prominent role for a woman in the country at that time. She maintained two different apartments in Washington Square in New York before and after the White House years and thereby opened the way to a host of new friends and renewed purpose. ER’s reinvention was a remarkable one, s...

What happens when one of the most famous women in the world goes back to work? She proves she has something to give by giving her all and leaving a legacy that no one can argue with. ⁠Jackie’s last 20 years were a study in how fulfilling a working life can be. She didn’t need to do it, she didn’t have to do it; she wanted to do it. ⁠And with two marriages behind her and two children at school, no...

Sustainable luxury travel expert, Juliet Kinsman, is your go-to person if the travel hotspots of the world that give back are on your wish list. She’s smart, she’s well -informed and she’s on Unpaused. Show Notes: Juliet's website Conde Naste Traveller Juliet's Book Rec 1: Open Up Why Talking About Money Will Change Your Life by Alex Holder Juliet's Book Rec 2: Loop Tail by Bruce Poon Tip (really...

India Hicks has been called the quintessential Brit “It” Girl-turned-entrepreneur but it's her latest chapter as a committed philanthropist that intrigues. Eloquent, provocative and never dull, here's India Hicks re-imagined on Unpaused.⁠  Show Notes:  India's website Lord Louis Mountbatten, India's grandfather David Hicks, India's father David's Egyptian Mausoleum Home on Windermere Isl...

Today, I am bringing you a story that is unfolding on a small Greek island - SYROS, where author and economist Oana Aristide has renovated a run-down, neo-classical villa into a jewel box of a hotel of just 9 suites, called Hotel Aristide . Oana’s personal story is a dramatic one. She grew up in Soviet-occupied Romania in her grandmother’s care, when her parents and sister defected - without her&n...

Becoming a mother heralds a dramatic change in the lives of Australian women. New mothers go from spending a weekly average of two hours caring for others to a staggering 51 hours. And when women become mothers, they also increase the time they spend on housework, like cooking, cleaning and washing, leaping from a weekly average of 16 hours to 25 hours in not much more than the blink of an eye. St...

In our first episode of Season 5 I’m doing something different: interviewing Annabelle Hickson and recording it before a live audience at ‘Bertholme’, a heritage-listed, 19th century sandstone house on the outskirts of Brisbane’s CBD. Annabelle is here to promote her brand new publication GALAH magazine, which of course, is not her first foray into the world of publishing and the printed word, but...

Ex Asian Spice Girl (yes, this band really existed) turned founder of feted interior design firm SIREN, Mia Feasey has a dazzling Unpaused story to tell. Arriving in Australia from the UK with no friends, no contacts and just £ 1000  in her pocket, Feasey worked 6 jobs, joining the local lacrosse team when loneliness began to tell. Little did she know how that single step would open career do...

Judy speaks to retired Australian Family Court Justice, Michelle May. Michelle’s is a story with a great twist. She grew up in Brisbane, raised by a professional working mother, unusual for those times, who was a role model and trusted advisor to Michelle.  Michelle recently retired from the bench after a 40-year career - firstly at the Family Court Bar, later as a Queens Counsel in that juri...

Judy chats with marketing expert Souad Christina Saied, about embarking on a new career, her journalling process which has amassed a stack of invaluable data about herself  (not only personally but professionally too) and her experience of racism and discrimination and what she's doing about it. Souad’s journaling habit, the signature exercise of  her practice as a budding life coach, ha...

Judy chats with Jane Bridge, Founder of Boardroom Partners. This is the Board intel everyone needs to hear but rarely accesses. For years, Jane ran Boardroom Partners, a board recruitment and advisory firm in Sydney. As a result, she is ideally placed to bear witness to the pitfalls and perils facing the board novice. If you’re considering a shift to a board role, or just wondering how the arcane...

'Sheryl Sandberg was right: the single most important career decision a woman makes is her choice of life partner. Brooks ignites that conversation for a new generation.' JAMILA RIZVI on The First Move by Emily Brooks  Emily Brooks, author of The First Move (a book about the awakening of the young dating feminist) puts her case for a woman working out her own wants and needs before taking a l...